Searching for habitable planets is certainly one of the most ambitious and stimulating objectives of scholars, and in this area interesting features have been detected in HD 20794 Da “super earth” identified by Michael Cretignier, astrophysicist of the University of Oxford. The Esopianeta was thus renamed as it is orbiting around its HD 20794 star, a yellow dwarf of the southern celestial constellation of Eridano, which is located at 19.7 light years from the earth.
The sensational discovery, to arrive at which an indispensable contribution has provided an international team made up of experts from the University of Geneva and the NCCR Planets Consortium, is the result of a study and reservations of twenty -year -olds carried out with “Harps” spectrographers, installed on the Telescope of the Chilean Observatory of La Silla, and “Espresso”, implemented in the Very Large Telescope which is always found in Chile but in the Atacama desert.
HD 20794 D is a rocky planet with a mass six times higher than that of the earth and revolves around one Type Gsimilar to our sun, making a journey within its “habitable area”, that is to say the one in which distances are maintained so that the presence of liquid water on its surface can be assumed. Unlike what happens for our planet or for Mars, which run around the sun making an almost “circular” path, this exoplanet has a more elliptical orbit, which leads it to periodically reach the distances that could be compatible with life .
Precisely this peculiarity makes it difficult to say with certainty if HD 20794 D has the perfect characteristics to be considered habitable or not. In a year, which lasts roughly on the exoplanet 640 daysthe distance from his mother star changes significantly. We move from moments in which it is closer to it, and the water on its surface would become liquid, to others in which it is beyond the so -called “habitable area” for which temperatures are assumed extremely rigid and incompatible with the aforementioned condition above of liquidity.
While on our planet the alternation between cold and hot seasons is not determined by the distance from the sun but by the inclination of the rotation axis with respect to the orbital plane, on HD 20794 D this element is instead of fundamental importance, so much so that it can assume that For a part of his year, any oceans could also freeze.
The exoplanet, which will continue to be observed with great attention, therefore provides interested ideas to continue with the search for life in other areas of our universe, and the proximity to the earth makes it an extremely interesting goal.